News You Can Use: "How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics"

From Maximum Progress, May 23:

The coolest trade econ paper I know 

Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age is an economics paper published in the QJE in 2019 and written as a collaboration between three economists (Thomas Chaney, Kerem Coşar, Ali Hortaçsu) and a historian of ancient Assyria, Gojko Barjamovic.

The idea of this paper is to use mentions of trade on Assyrian clay tablets from nearly four thousand years ago to estimate the size and location of ancient Assyrian cities, even those whose true location is unknown. They build a model that accurately recreates the location of known cities and makes predictions for the locations of lost cities that often line up with active archaeological sites, the best-guesses of historians, and sometimes favor the guesses of some historians over others.

The authors also find evidence for extremely long-term persistence of the distance elasticity of trade as well as city size and location. The predicted size of ancient Assyrian cities in their model correlates strongly with the size of their closest modern counterparts and the costs of distance to trade seem to be the same on bronze age wagon-roads as they are on modern Turkish highways.

Data
The data for this paper comes from the ancient Hittite city of Kaneš, now known as the archaeological site of Kültepe, nestled in the hills of eastern-central Turkey.

Around 1900 BCE, this city was a flourishing entrepot. Despite being deep within Hittite territory, the economic activity of the city was dominated by a community of Assyrian expatriate traders with connections to the powerful city state of Assur, near modern day Mosul in Iraq. So important was this city to Assyrian trade that it hosted an Assyrian court that adjudicated disputes between merchants....

....MUCH MORE 

We have a few posts on the Assyrians but most of our Bronze Age posting has been on the Hittites, e.g.

"The Hittites Lived in Interesting Times"

You never know when the flight attendant is going to get on the speaker and ask "Does anyone onboard know anything about the Hittites?"
And should that time come, you will be ready

Probably not related though similarly ancient:

Did Dutch Hordes Kill off the Early Britons Who Started Stonehenge and Thereby Create the Anti-European Zeitgeist That Led To Brexit 4500 Years Later?